Are you aware of your impact on others in your organization, on your team, in your industry, at home with your family, or even on yourself? Self-awareness is a critical part of being a complete leader; it is a critical element of emotional intelligence.
Leaders with high amounts of self-awareness consistently out-perform on their objectives by an average of 20%, where as those with low levels of self-awareness consistently under-perform on their objectives by 20%. This is consistent across industries and around the world!
A self-aware leader knows what makes him or her happy, upset, agitated, motivated, inspired, etc. They know what “Hot Buttons” cause them to over-react, lose their cool, or do things out of character.
You, my fellow leader, need to be able to do the same. You need to get in touch with yourself. Really start to look deeply inside. Start paying attention to how you feel when you are in different situations and how you react. Ask other people that you are close to and you trust to give you feedback.
Here’s an example…
I get extremely agitated when I receive poor customer service by someone that is completely apathetic to the privilege of serving customers. I get frustrated. I want to walk away and tell the world about it. I used to make it my purpose to “educate” the person in customer service.
But once I got in touch with my awareness of this one particular feeling, I looked at it from a different lens. A lens that saw the organization and not the person as the perpetrator of terrible service because of the lack of training and care that had gone into the person they chose to put in front of the customer. More importantly, taking on this new lens allowed me to realize that poor customer service wasn’t worth stressing over; instead, I might as well just go elsewhere.
That is just one example. I have a few others too (believe me!).
Developing your self-awareness will help you identify when you’re doing things to impress others, and when you’re serving yourself. When you do things for other, you’ll feel intimidated, and maybe even harbor fear. Then you’ll realize ‘why?’
Once you develop your self-awareness, you will be amazed at what happens next. You will start to make better decisions about how you react to certain situations.
When you make better decisions, you get better results.
